supercalifragilisticspiegelidocious

We contend that the drone at the onset of All Tomorrow’s Parties is a live recording of the beginning of the universe if its Cause has a bias towards Life, and if Life has a bias towards Love. Sarah Davachi’s Dominions stretches that drone into the asymptote, and kills time so that we can be witnesses of the birth of space, and time.

We sit back in our sofa beyond the edge of reality and let the cosmic piper do its thing.

Thousands now dead will live forever

In our minds today, sounds become words that convey images and tell stories. We turn those words into sounds and initiate an infinite regression from our literate present to a past of voices and grunts and twitches and rolls and hurling through the void until we reach stasis, spread geological over the rumbling and flowing surface of a young planet, letting sounds that we have not ears to ear wash over us in their astronomical purity.

Turn the black hole inside out like a glove and rinse its information off, gather it carefully in a bowl and mix it with the thick ale until it dissolves completely, then gaze at this melange safe in the knowledge that when you drink it, it will make you a God.

Volcanic eruptions rupture the skin of this planet that is also your skin, and clouds of smoke swirl in the nascent atmosphere, taking the shape of pre-raphaelite angels that dance and embrace and joust in a miracle with no witness, the only kind there is.

Continue?

There are some things that are unlistenable, unreadable, unwatchable.Not because of their quality or because of their intrinsic horror.They are shunned in my mind because dealing with their extrinsichorror is too much.

The first record I experienced this with was ANOHNI’s Hopelessness.An exceptional album that deals so directly with such world annihilating-ly pressing concepts, that to listen is to continually rip the scab from your own first experience of them.The totalitarian nightmare of the surveillance state; the (now fully underway) existential catastrophe of Climate Change; the death of the pseudo-liberal world order one drone strike at a time.

It’s a great record and I’m glad she made it but I just…can’t.Not while we keep losing.

Colin Self’s new album on RVNG is called Siblings.It draws its inspiration from Donna J. Haraway’s writing.Indeed one track is named directly after her (perfectly titled) book: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.A book that deals directly with our effect on the living systems of earth and posits a fundamental change of relationship.It also (apparently*) rails against ‘bitter ‘game over’ pseudo-wisdom’.Which is something I think we should all get behind.

Today’s track isn’t that though (which is a fucking massive three minute Techno banger) but a track from earlier in the album, Foresight.

It has that clarity, that sincerity that Lynch so often appropriates and places next to seemingly innocuous images to create something eerie and strange.Precisely because sincerity is so strange.At one moment it’s This Mortal Coil, at another the vocal chanting is straight from Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s Akira score.

Siblings is an exceptional record and maybe it too will become unlistenable or maybe, in time, I’ll realise the game isn’t over.

MAHT

Today I come back from the cold to tell you about three blinding techno albums released in 2018. If we project their vibes into multi-dimensional culture-space, we find them clustering with failed visions of the F-117 Nighthawk that were too deadly sleek, that Culture novel Iain M Banks would have written if cancer hadn’t taken him above, and the collective galactic encephalogram produced by a generation of kosmische hacks now resting body-dead but not brain-dead in Amoeba records’ new age section.

I will keep things short because each word I type is a blip in the sensorium of those obsidian sharks that lurk in the impossible cathedrals of this music. Remember the words carved in the altar:

Saturday Mixtape: Talking German Army Unreleased Blues

Rescued from the hideous tendrils of our Gmail filters, we bring you…a new mixtape! By German Army! Of unreleased jams (+John Barry)!

Echoey, claustrophobic and haunting in all the right ways, this is your mixtape to the apocalypse-verse we now find ourselves in. Did you hear me? This is YOUR soundtrack to picking your way through a climate scorched wasteland, dodging the ironic/not-ironic fascists as your insane rulers cosplay Empire. Headphones in, hood up.

Music for rehabilitation

Materialising, as if dropped by a benevolent god onto this desolate plain, H Takahashi’s Escapism has recently entered our life.

Recorded around his day job, the world of Escapism is as far removed from the grim machinery of work as you could hope.Light, contemplative, complex; any rhythms here do not ape the industrial, instead their gentle bubbling waves obliterate all thoughts of labour.

Crystal is a brief moment among the album’s lengthier tracks.It’s the pinnacle of Escpaism’s many delicacies.Airy and fragile synths, continuously ascending, forming a tower of light.And around this arpegiated tower smaller melodies dance, endlessly unfurling their beauty.

We want to write…

The intersection of New Age and the subtle tape distortions of drifting Balearic House: a love story.

We want to write about the Me decade, composed of those boomers who rebelled against the 60s and embraced a hyper-conservatism.That were the host organism for the social and economic ideas that would decimate communities and culture.They were the shock troops for Berardi / Fisher’s ‘slow cancellation of the future’.And if our future’s been constrained to creative reconfigurations of our past then the revival of New Age is the greatest expression of it.

We want to write about New Age, the soundtrack to the Me Generation in their larval form.Still exploring the trauma of the 70’s global nervous breakdown.Searching for answers in the wreckage of fuel crises and dying industries.Some finding it in alt-religious experiences that inevitably led to disaster.

We want to write about Balearic House.A genre that feels like the last island outpost of many dreams.The place where the utopian sound of New Age found refuse along with its listeners.

We want to write about all these things but, for today, we mostly want to luxuriate in the second track on Precipitation’s tape release, Earth / Sky.Beginning, as all things must, with a lone distorted synth.As if Vangelis was scoring a desert ritual.A quiet moment after the rain, synth washes coming in to comfort and caress.But without much time to process this melancholy, we’re joined by primitive drum machines, tapping out the unmistakeable sounds of House.A tinny, thin sort of House.The sort of House that’s never intended to fill a floor, but to exist as cell between exhaustion and melancholy.To animate what’s left of your body in a early chill of morning.

The second track is called Earth 2.It is beautiful and you can hear it below.